Ah, another nail in MOCA’s coffin means another chance to bask in the power and glory that is James Franco.

Pretty!

Wait…is that a Janet Jackson video?

Seriously.  I asked myself that question as I wandered through the Herb Ritts: LA. Style exhibition at the Getty.  And yet, there was no escaping it.  That not only was a Janet Jackson video (Love Will Never Do Without You) but the gallery showing the videos (I’ll assume Cherish and Wicked Game were also showing, I just missed being aghast at them.  Sorry, Chris and Madge.) was packed.  So people could watch music videos.  This is what happens when MTV just drops the M from its name.

But this pretty much set the tone for the exhibition.  It wasn’t a fine art exhibit. It was a retrospective on a very successful celebrity/commercial photographer and highlighting his greatest hits.  It was both exactly what I unfortunately expected and strangely illuminating in ways I don’t think anyone involved realized.  Hell, I hadn’t even realized it until I looked closely enough.  Herb Ritts didn’t give a shit about the people he was photographing.  They could have been Bobo dolls for all the humanity he brought out in them.  Most of them didn’t even have faces.

"Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume 1987" - Herb Ritts from "Herb Ritts: L.A. Style" at the Getty Center

Is that really the best way to memorialize Jackie Joyner-Kersee?  Can you even tell that’s Jackie Joyner-Kersee since he cut her head out of the photo?  I know at her peak she was physically amazing, but can’t she also still be a full person with a head?  Would his vision be compromised if we could see the laser focus in her eyes or the set of her square jaw when she competed?  Because her face, awkward, androgynous and oddly sweet when she smiled, was as memorable about her as her impressive thighs.

And it wasn’t just women and athletes, or women athletes, that he negated.  Even his  “muse” Tony Ward was reduced to the sum of his muscular parts.  Although, things didn’t get any more engaging when he did feature Ward’s face, since he went with the most dead-eyed stare he could pull out of Tony:

Madonna totally wouldn't have fetishized this guy in her "Justify My Love" video.

And yet there it was.  Photo after photo of models and famous people being utterly objectified and stripped of their humanity in service of looking like human statues, all glossy, smooth and shiny, but with no life.  To say it was disconcerting is to understate it.  But what really chapped me was his portrait of Spanish film star and bon vivant, Rossy de Palma:

Was she supposed to look like Jesus in Ritts' portrait?

I wanted to include a photo of how I remember Rossy looking at the time, because I never thought she looked like Jesus.  And yet he took that crazy amazing face of hers, covered it in shadows, and made her look like a religious icon.  That’s criminal.  The woman on the right will show you a good time all around Spain, but the woman on the left? Dead.

I remember being a fan of Ritts when he was at his most famous.  Because there was a surface prettiness to his work that individually, or in a small fashion layout, never showed how little he seemed to care about the people with whom he was working.  But when viewed all at once, and with nothing but the superficial to recommend his work, the dehumanizing effect becomes overwhelming.

So go see the exhibition if you want to look at just how pretty we thought people should be in the 90s.  It’s a very pretty exhibition.  But don’t go looking for heart or thought or emotion, because as Willam Belli will tell you, emotions are for ugly people.

Earlier this month, Huffington Post, while writing about her being honored by MOCA, referred to Annie Leibovitz, rather foolishly, as arguably the greatest photographer ever (which it has since changed…thanks to the guffaws of roughly every commenter, ever) and I dismissed it as general Deitchian bullshit in service to the cult of celebrity.  After all, he’s already staged a Dennis Hopper exhibition and has taken up permanent residence in James Franco’s ass.

Is Leibovitz’s photo or Heiden the work of art here?

But then banners started popping up all over LA about the new Herb Ritts: L.A. Style exhibition at The Getty Center (I’ll have more to say about the actual exhibition this weekend) and I started questioning how and why a photographer’s fame became synonymous with his or her art.

This isn’t to say that Leibovitz, or Ritts (or even Hopper in his MOCA exhibition) are bad photographers.  Quite the contrary at least Leibovitz and Ritts.  (I’ll leave you to discuss Hopper’s value as an artist.) As commercial photographers they’re top notch and created aesthetics unique to them that defined their eras and likely influenced/inspired younger photographers.  But does that in and of itself make it “fine” art?  And is that a bad thing, if their work was primarily commercial?

Richard Gere, San Bernardino, 1977 – Herb Ritts

Personally, I think it does them a disservice.  Venue dictates expectations and when I go to a photography exhibit at MOCA or The Getty Center, I’m not expecting to see portraits of Miley Cyrus or Richard Gere.  Their impact is lessened when the copy accompanying the images waxes profound about the slimy octopus on Djimon Hounsou’s head or uses words like architectonic to describe a photo of a model in the desert when geometric would have made more sense.  These same photos in a gallery are better received because they’re not elevated above their contemporaries.

And no matter how nice the images are to look at, by displaying them in museums instead of smaller gallery settings, expectations are raised but not met because the biggest draw is their names and fame and fame of the subjects rather than the work itself.  Which clearly was a pretty big draw for the Ritts exhibition so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass.

Which of these images is “art?”

Anyway, I come here not to bury the celebrity photographer, just to question where his or her rightful place is?  Do people like Leibovitz and Ritts really belong in fine art museums simply by virtue of having been ubiquitous at one time?  How does a photographer elevate his or her work from documenting what’s seen into fine art? And is being commercial really that bad?

Finding the beauty in things others may find nuisances.

Copenhagen: Roofs Under the Snow - Kroyer, permanent exhibit, LACMA

I went to LACMA last week and when the exhibition we planned on visiting wasn’t fully operational at the time, we decided to go up to the mysterious third floor of the Ahmanson Building, which featured a weird Rodarte exhibition where unappealingly 70s looking dresses were allegedly inspired by medieval religious iconography (hmm…) but was mostly sponsored galleries of artwork donated from private collections.

There was a lot of ornately carved marble, sandstone and alabaster, great, big Victorian portraits of unfortunate looking British people, various Rodins, Degas, Gauguins and Monets, and on a wall, next to a doorway to a gallery was a tiny, tiny canvas called Copenhagen: Roofs Under the Snow by Peder Severin Krøyer.

Everything about this painting should have made it fade into the background.  It was really small, the colors were muted, the image was almost pedestrian, but when put together, all those things actually made the painting engaging.

The quirks make it feel alive and real, and not like a study of rooftops.  The point of view draws you in and makes you want to know where he was when he painted this.  You can almost feel the cold through the window or the heat from within.  The light feels like sunset and it’s all so very small that there’s an intimacy, almost a voyeurism, to looking at it.  More than anything, though, I felt a sense of safety and warmth and comfort looking at the painting.

My own weak attempt to photograph it.

I even attempted to photograph it with my own crappy little point and click camera, so you could get a better idea of what it looks like without the digital manipulation to show it in its best light.  And believe it or not, it’s not even that much larger than my photo.

I might have responded more to it because winter was my favorite season while I was growing up on Long Island.  I fondly remember feeling the cold wind on my face and smelling the burning wood from fireplaces as I’d walk home from my friend Helen’s house.  The heat of summer makes me drowsy and stupid, but a cold, crisp Long Island winter day always seemed full of potential, opportunity.  There’s a reason the phrase “Come in from the cold,” has so much emotional heft, while we just “go crazy from the heat.”

And it’s probably all those warm, nostalgic feelings I have for the Long Island winters of my childhood that makes me love this painting so much.  But even with all the cognitive dissonance around it of galleries that didn’t seem so much curated as thrown together based upon collector, this humble little canvas was my favorite new painting at LACMA.

And if you want to see photos of other paintings, sculptures and what not that caught my eye, here’s the slideshow.

Entertaining randomness to end the year.

A pretty little video to send off 2011.  (Pay no attention to the ad at the end.)

Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works by Chronicle Books – BOOOOOOOM! – CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO * PROJECTS.

Too late for Christmas but…want!

Jerry considers confessing that he’s a hack while China thinks “Ooh, pretty.”

Work of Art ended Wednesday night, and despite all my complaints about how lackluster the season’s been, it rights its ship by rewarding the best technical artist in the finale who also put together the most cohesive show and I find I have nothing to say but that I’m glad it ended the way it did.

A good result can erase all the earlier disappointments of Bayeté staying over Ugo and Lola staying over Leon (That her stupid Arab Spring Twitter feeds wasn’t in the bottom of the Pop Art challenge will forever remain a mystery.) and Jerry thinking that if he flatters the hot babe with big boobs that, no really, she has talent that he’ll get to hug her, and showing just how provincial allegedly sophisticated New York art critics and gallery owners can be when confronted with non New York artists whose reputations (or lack thereof) don’t inform what the critic and art dealer should think and leads them to waxing profound about candy colored billboards and blacked-out newspaper. So, thank you Jerry Saltz and Bill Powers for confirming that you really don’t know all that much more about art than I do.  And congratulations, Kymia Nawabi, for sticking to your preferred medium and drawing some lovely, creepy and occasionally ghoulish images, even if you didn’t “stretch” yourself to include new media that you’re unfamiliar with or venture into conceptual work that, when laid bare, can be just a huge load of bullshit, Young.

Surprisingly restrained for someone who seemed to vibrate with anxiety throughout the season.

She’d been a favorite of mine, and my dark horse choice to win, since the beginning as I liked her portfolio before the show began, but as with most viewers her win for the children’s art piece really solidified who she is as an artist. And in a show full of installation and performance and toy-making artists, it was nice to see someone with the old-fashioned skills set of being able to draw freehand win. I know Abdi also had those skills, but I also thought Abdi was still more of an art student than an artist and while he could create good pieces there was no “there” there, yet. Kymia’s work seemed more advanced and personal than Abdi’s. To me, her finale exhibit was the strongest of the six presented over both seasons. (Especially since I thought Peregrine should have won last season.)

So with that established, I’ll just give my ideas on their individual shows.

Kymia Nawabi “Not for Long, My Forlorn,” courtesy of bravotv.com

Kymia built her exhibit around the idea of the afterlife in a secular realm. Her pieces weren’t overtly religious or even particularly spiritual. Most of her drawings were rooted in the natural world and the spiritual transcendence of the body’s mortality. Yeah, even reading that it’s all granola-crunching hippiness, but she brought her own slightly ghoulish style to keep it from becoming too patchouli wearing.

Kymia Nawabi “Not for Long, My Forlorn,” courtesy of bravotv.com

When Simon “spontaneously” said they’d auction off a piece, I pretty much knew Kymia won. She had the most “sellable” piece in the boat drawing. I wasn’t as enamored of it as the judges were but even Jerry managed to praise her use of material to add dimension and texture to the drawing. He also managed to sniff his nose at it because, despite clapping like a seal at every one of Young’s most obvious pieces, he felt the feet were too “obvious,” but he’s Jerry.

Several of her other drawing, and especially the headdress, were also sellable pieces so Simon had stuff to choose from. But what really established that she was the winner was them featuring Kaws discussing her drawings in such a dreamy way. Finales of competitive reality shows generally feature the guest judge praising the winner and this finale was no different. I did like how taken he seemed with her at the post win reception encouraging her to come visit him at his studio in Brooklyn.

Walking the galleries with Kaws seemed to do Bill a world of good. Jerry condescendingly says Bill “developed” into a good critic over the course of the show (I don’t even really like Bill all that much, but dude, that’s just obnoxious.) and I wonder if it’s not because he was mostly assigned to view the shows with the guest judges. Whatever it was, Bill seemed almost as taken with Kymia’s drawings as was Kaws which is what I think put her over the top.

Young Sun Han “Bool-sa-jo,” courtesy of bravotv.com

But still, as Young so “humbly” pointed out, his easily digested, faux-important pabulum had made him a lot of money and the clear front-runner to win because if it makes no sense and looks cheap, it must be good? And that’s how he approached the finale. While Kymia and Sara spent their three months creating pieces, he built a platform and planned to take pictures of it during his triumphant trip back to New York where the last photo would be in front of the Brooklyn Museum. Not too arrogant in his belief of his own awesomeness. Luckily for us, Simon told him that idea was utter bullshit and to focus on something a little less coldly arrogant. And something only a little less coldly arrogant, but a lot more emotionally manipulative is what he did.

His show, in comparison to the two women’s, showed exactly how superficial his approach to the work really is. He built his show, at Simon’s urging, around the recent death of his father, but he made it too much about his father and how his father passed that it was an homage that only encouraged viewers to have that one emotion…sympathy for Young because his father died.

He may have tried to say there was more there, but clotheslines of his father’s shirts with pictures of his father dying was too closed-ended. Once you looked at them, you moved on. I was roughly Young’s age when my father died under similar circumstances. I remember it well, as China remembered her mother’s passing, but that seems cheap and exploitative. Where Kymia used the specific (her own father’s death) to consider the universal, Young just used the specific to make people admire him.

Young Sun Han “Bool-sa-jo,” courtesy of bravotv.com

Further, one of his alleged strengths, performance pieces, was not only not present in his final exhibit, although I think the original plan to feature photos of that platform taken during his “triumphant” return to NYC might have been a performance/conceptual aspect, but ended up being better represented by someone, Sara J, who isn’t even a performance artist. Young’s pieces have an immediate impact that makes them seem better than they ultimately are, but in this instance his flaws and failings were so much more apparent because the women used his themes and media better.

Sara Jimenez “Anonymous Contemplations,” courtesy of bravotv.com

Sara had a great idea with the performance piece and had she focused a little more on the video being the centerpiece of her show she could have, and probably would have won. I think she ended up doing herself a disservice by creating the large sculptures, specifically the bed of needles which only referred to the performance piece in an ancillary manner. She’d have done better to set up a few benches so people could watch the video and then line the walls with the water colors and drawings and have the birdcage and woman in the bird suit collecting new confessions at the entrance/exit. More obvious but also more cohesive.

Sara Jimenez “Anonymous Contemplations,” courtesy of bravotv.com

But I disagree with them dismissing her as the third place finisher. She had a concept that she developed and went beyond the personal. She may not have succeeded in creating a cohesive show and ended up diminishing its strongest element, but if the criteria is “pushing yourself” or “stepping out of your comfort zone,” Sara’s the only finalist who even tried and came close. A couple of tweaks and her show is as good as or better than Kymia’s. Young’s was not conceptually stronger nor did he step beyond his high concept/low skills approach so I really can’t see how or why he was better. It’s all just a matter of semantics, though, so I’m not too disappointed that she came in third instead of her rightful second place.

And with this finale, I’m on board for a third season, if there is a third season. Maybe they’ll pull one of Bravo’s favorite little games and let an artist who was eliminated early (Ugo? Katherine? Leon?) come back and compete again. Just not Bayeté or Lola. We know what they’re capable of, and there are plenty of charlatans/crap artists who can take their places.

So Happy Holidays, and if there’s another season, see you next year!

I love both Swoon and Olek, and after hearing them talk about their work, you’ll love them, too.

Thanks, PBS.org.